by Tim Curran
It oozed over the ground in her direction, slopping and slimy and gushing. She threw the bat at it and ran. She had no idea where she was going. She dashed through yards and threw herself over hedges, ducked behind cars and tripped over curbs.
Finally, laying in the grass of the Moody’s yard, she stared up into the sky into the eye of the storm entity high above. It had gained not only mass but volume, darkening into some malevolent maelstrom that reached out spiraling black limbs across the sky, spinning and spinning with a dizzying motion, the blood-red sun becoming its eye that looked down from some cosmic wasteland with evil intent.
The time of the gathering, she thought. It’s almost here. It’s…almost…here…
But what did that really mean? What did any of it really mean? What was the point, the purpose of it all? Would it end? Could it end? She didn’t know. She didn’t know anything. She was trying damn hard to hold on to her sanity but, dear God, it was greasy and slippery. It kept sliding through her fingers and all she really wanted to do was maybe scream and then fold-up, just fold up and call it a day because this was beyond her, this was all beyond her, it was bigger and deadlier than her imagination could grasp. It literally strained the seams of human comprehension.
With everything going on around her—the weird light, the weirder storm, the shadowy forms of people mulling about, and now a strange sort of rumbling from far below—she was gripped by that stark, shivery feeling she got sometimes when she woke from a nightmare at three in the morning: the sensation that terror lived in the darkness with her, that it had wound her up in a cold mesh of web dripping with spider spit, and she would never, ever break free. It was like that, but maybe even worse because it was not just around her and hovering over her in a darkened bedroom like a ghost; it was inside her, living in her skin and crawling along her bones.
The time of gathering is coming. It will call to you. It will demand you become part of it. Face it with an empty belly…
Mr. Hammerberg’s words again. She shivered because it did not seem like a mind voice at all, but one that had just whispered into her ear.
“You’re going to get hungry, Bree,” another voice said, only this one was definitely not her own and definitely not in her head. It was real. It was spoken mere feet from her. But as she looked, there was no one there. “You’re going to get real hungry as the hour approaches. You’ll try to fight against the hunger, but you’ll fail. You must give into it or things will become awful beyond anything your little mind can imagine.”
It was the voice of a little girl. Bria did not recognize it, but in not recognizing it, she was almost certain that she had heard it before, but not for a very long, long time.
“Bree? Are you there? Are you listening to me?” the little girl voice asked. “Can you hear what I’m saying?”
Yes, she heard all right, but she knew it was her imagination or a hallucination, and she would not give into it. She refused to give into it. Somehow, though, she knew that would not be enough. What was dogging her would not give in so easily.
“Bree? Are you there? Breeeeee….”
“Fuck you,” she said, climbing to her feet and stumbling across the street, pressing her hands to her ears so she did not hear any more of it.
“It will call to you, Bree,” the voice echoed. “It will demand you become part of it. You are the most important of all. Without you, there is nothing.”
She ran, knowing she must not listen, not hear, not remember. It had never been so important. Bad thoughts. Bad ideas. Bad associations. Bad impulses. That’s why bad girls were locked in boxes and there they must stay regardless of how frantically they scratched at the lids to be let out.
The first thing she saw was the Stromm house. The second thing she saw was a figure sitting on the porch swing, rocking back and forth. She knew it was Lara because it had to be Lara. Just as she knew it would be bad because everything was bad now. Reality was unraveling.
Bria stepped up to the porch, her heart fluttering in her chest, her body oily with sweat.
“Hey, Bria,” Lara said. “Nice night, isn’t it?”
But, of course, it wasn’t night, not really. It was like some prolonged yellow twilight that made the weirdness of Birch Street seem that much weirder. No, it was not night any more than Lara was really Lara. What sat in the swing was a cadaverous thing with black, ravaged sockets where its eyes should have been. In its arms it held a squirming, bloated thing that really did look like a grub, an immense fleshy grub that was suckling her right breast with greedy, slobbering sounds.
“Ah, the little grub is hungry tonight,” Lara said, and Bria saw the flesh from her nose to her chin had completely rotted away, exposing speckled gums and gnarled teeth. Huge black flies crawled over the exposed tissue.
Bria would have screamed had she been capable of the act. But there was nothing left inside her. She felt empty, hollow to her core. She stumbled back and back, trembling, fearing her mind was really, truly gone.
“Your mother’s hungry, too, Bree,” Lara said in a sort of slurping voice, as if her tongue had gone to mush. “Very hungry. And so are you.”
Bria began to sob. The tears just came out of her as they had come out so many times before.
Lara stopped rocking, and Grub stopped suckling her. In the dimness, her eyes were the dark, rich blood-red of wet cherries. “When I call you, Bria, you will come,” she said.
21
Margie Blowers felt everything inside her go to water. Her guts, her bones, her organs…all seemed to be liquid. Her bladder filled and then emptied itself, splashing down her legs.
A low chuckling drifted up the stairway. “Mommy of mine, don’t you go anywhere,” the voice of Polly said, “because I’m bringing you a present…a real special present.”
Margie stood there with the phone in her hand. For one crazy, impossible moment, she could not remember why she was holding it. Then it came back to her: she was going to call the police and report that some evil entity had taken over her daughter.
And they’ll come and take her/it away, put her in a cell and a straitjacket where the entity can do no further harm to Polly. Then when the demon is gone, when they’ve forced it out of her, she’ll be released, and she’ll be my dear sweet wonderful angel of a daughter and everything will be like it was and we can forget this awfulness, this horror, this fucking insanity
She began to giggle, then to laugh hysterically, then it became tears that burned her eyes and spilled down her cheeks until she could taste their saltiness on her lips.
Polly was coming up the stairs, and she was singing some chilling, childish ditty just under her breath: “Dum-dum-da-dum, dee-dee-dee-dum-da-da-dum!” With each repetition, each note, it seemed to get louder and louder until it filled Margie’s head, echoing and echoing, and she could barely stand it. She clutched her hands to her ears, crying and whimpering because she knew what it was. Everyone knew Chopin’s Funeral March.
“Dum-dum-da-dum,” Polly sang, enjoying every dire, morose inflective, “dee-dee-dee-dum-da-da-dum!”
Everything tightened inside of Margie like a slow twisting screw until it felt like her guts would come right out of her mouth or be forced from her ass. That song, that terrible song. She had to make it stop. The entire house was reverberating with it.
Polly was nearly to the top of the stairs.
I’ll shut her up! I’ll beat her down and tie her up and shove a washcloth in her mouth! That’s what I’ll do!
But no, no, no, she couldn’t do that because while that might silence the demon it would also hurt Polly and, oh my God, she could not hurt Polly. She’d sooner beat herself senseless or peel her skin off with a razor. But not Polly, never Polly. She had never raised a hand to her. She had always given Polly exactly what she wanted or she would cry and have fits, and Margie couldn’t bear it which was why Polly was such an insufferable shit, such a spoiled manipulative brat even as an adult.
NO
! She’s fine! She’s wonderful! She’s perfect in every way!
Margie sobbed because she wanted, needed it to be true even though she knew her daughter was a demanding, scheming, cunning monster.
Polly stood at the top of the stairs. “We are gathered here today to pay our last respects to Polly Anne Pukebag,” she said, appraising her mother with a single watery gray eye that cried tears of slime. She grinned with yellow, vulpine teeth that were gnarled and crooked. Her head was split open from the crown to the bridge of her nose, her face chewed through with gaping ulcerous sores. “Girl, that is born of woman, hath but a short fucking time to live, and is full of misery“
Margie was on her feet, head whipping back and forth. She would not hear such blasphemy. “STOP IT! STOP IT! YOU STOP WITH THAT TALK! YOU STOP RIGHT NOW!”
Polly kept right on speaking: “In the midst of life we are in death,” she said, her swollen face pulsating, bubbles of black goo popping from the holes in it. Her breathing was liquid and slushy, flies encrusting her, busy, busy, busy, as they fed and laid their eggs and filled the house with a droning, terrible buzz.
“NO! NO! NOT MY POLLY!” Margie bellowed. “NOT MY BEAUTFUL WONDERFUL GIRL! YOU LEAVE HER ALONE! YOU GET OUT OF HER! DON’T YOU DARE BLASPHEME HER!”
The Polly entity laughed with a sound like a scream echoing up from a mineshaft. She was hardly beautiful or wonderful in any way. She was, in fact, cracking open, jagged rents connecting the multiple suppurating sores of her body as she decomposed into a scabrous, seething mass of green flesh and maggots, thousands of winged insects bursting from her. She rippled. She surged. Bones thrust from her shivering mass like pointing fingers. She reached up and gripped her head with two skeletal hands and ripped it free with a sound like roots being torn from hard-packed, stony soil.
Margie screamed out what was left of her sanity as the head bounced off her, striking the wall and rolling to a stop. It grinned at her with a mouth of black, bubbling ooze. “The gathering,” it said. “It’s time for the gathering…”
22
Out on Birch Street, there was an uneasy silence as the air thickened like sweet cream, growing wet and warm with a skin-crawling humidity. It smelled of ozone and heat, steam and distant rain. And something worse, something sharp and acrid and chemical like battery acid. Nothing moved. No one stirred. They watched, they waited. Their hearts pounded and their breath barely came. In their minds, they saw the same nebulous mass that circled counterclockwise high, high abovethe spiral, the fuming black spiral that sparkled with pinpoints of light. A low reverberating vibration was felt underfoot, along spines, deep in bones, and particularly in the metal of filled teeth which grew hot now, singeing gums.
The reverberation became a steady, insistent thrumming that soon enough was more like the throbbing of a heart—boom-boom, boom-boom-BOOM!—until the streets seem to shake and windows rattled in frames, trees shaking and houses trembling. Above, there was a rushing, screeching noise of storm winds and a steadily rising static like that from an old radio.
The sky was pink-purple, elongated shadows moving around and around, darkening the faces of houses in squiggly, looping forms. The ever-spiraling storm threw out bolts of green and blue lightning as the throbbing made branches fall from trees and the windows of cars shatter.
Then it happened: that spinning vortexual spiral of dark mist irised open and a neon yellow orb looked down on Birch Street.
Helleye.
Helleye had arrived.
23
Bria stumbled in the street, pulled herself to her feet, and promptly tripped over the curb. Her legs felt numb and rubbery, her mind spinning faster and faster on its axis, leaving her breathless and pop-eyed. As she stood yet again, staring with absolute horror at Helleye high above, it felt like hundreds of hot needles were piercing her. They impaled her guts and heart and lungs, skewering her muscles and tissues until she cried out in pain and terror. She pressed her hands over her eyes because she knew she must not look at what was up there, the thing she had not seen since the Dark Castle.
It doesn’t matter! a voice cried out from her core. Can’t you see that? It can look through your hands and eyelids and see right into the center of your mind!
Her heart slammed in her chest in an uneasy, painful rhythm, her body shuddering and jerking with pinpoint convulsions as if she were a puppet dangling on strings that were being tugged by an unseen hand.
The eye. The eye. The eye.
It was pure arcing energy, magnetism and gravitational force, and at the same time, gelatinous flesh and oozing fibrous tissue and steaming hot radioactive sludge. The world burned beneath its gaze. The earth rumbled, the street cracked open, things fell and crashed and voices screamed from every direction as the faithful massed.
Now the world around her was unmade, disrupted, turned inside out, and it was as she remembered from her vision when Mr. DeYoung had attacked herthe neighborhood was gray and dead, houses covered in corpse fungus and the grass gone to cigarette ash that blew through the streets. There was a horrible stench of death like a thousand graves had erupted, spilling rotting cadavers in plague heaps and tons of dead fish were dropped on top of them.
All the trees were black and gnarled like skeletal, reaching hands burnt black. There were no leaves, no buds, no blossoms, the fruit they gave forth was putrescent and grislyheads and arms and torsos speared by branches, limbs growing in them and through them, twigs poking from the empty eye sockets of pallid faces and jutting like tongues from contorted, agonized mouths. They became the spines of torsos and projected from bellies in whip-like tendrils and grew from fingertips. This was the nabe become a cemetery.
It was as if a forest had grown from the depths of a graveyard, carrying the mortuary bounty of caskets with them as they propagated and matured, cadavers disjointed by spreading branches and shoots until they were part of the trees themselves.
Bria’s mind exploded with thoughts and memories, everything jumping into her skull at once, spinning, mixing up, bleeding into one another until it was like some multihued, multifaceted, multi-textural psychedelic rush of what was and what was not, dream and recall and hot-bladed nightmare fantasy.
Do you…can you remember the Dark, Dark Castle?
She could, and she couldn’t. She did, and she didn’t. It was real, and it was smoke ghost. It existed, and it was unreal at the same time.
You brought it here. Only you know what the endgame is.
Yes, yes, yes, she knew all right, at least for one burning electric moment as her insides were flooded with brilliant, hot white light that made her cackle insanely and giggle and scream, snarl and shriek.
As she tried to run with pure instinctive animal fear, the light and heat and radiant burning energy enveloped her and she was flying, lifted up and up, drifting over the nabe, limp and mindless, her identity crackling with dirty spikes of fission…and then she was dropped face first into the soft, spongy loam of a backyard.
You’re going to be hungry now.
You’re going to eat.
You’re going to fill yourself and be well.
I will guide you.
I will stand at your side.
And when I call you, you will come…
24
Home, she was home, and as she stepped through the door there was a sickening, gaseous stench of backed-up sewers and dead animals, piss and shit and black vomit, rotting pelts and slaughterhouses, blood and marrow and corpse slime. All of it combined and pressed into the form of a little girl that walked and talked like some graveyard mannequin.
“Hello, Bria,” it said with a grating, raw voice as if it had swallowed shards of glass.
Bria fell back against the wall, the terror that leapt inside her both cold and hot, utterly incapacitating. She could feel everything inside her drain into her feet. The thing standing before her was like some twisted, bloated evil dwarf. It wore a party dress filthy with blood and drainage and black
soil. Maggots crawled in the ringlets atop its head. Its face was blackened, bulging and tumescent, its eyes bleached of color, just as white as goose eggs.
“Betcha never thought you’d see me again,” its scraping voice said.
Bria knew she was looking at herself, a childhood version of herself, the way she might have looked at seven or eight…had she died then been dug up two weeks later.
The death stench faded and was replaced by something possibly even worse: a wild, animal smell, a stink of dirty straw and urine and meat scraps in a cage. By then, Little Bria, Bria from hell, was standing right in front of her, breathing hot carrion breath in her face.
“You’ve been a naughty, naughty girl,” she said, “and you must be punished.”
Before Bria could even comprehend what that might mean, the imp punched her in the face. She felt her nose break and blood splash down her face. She cried out in pain and Little Bria kicked her in the stomach, making her fold up, then punched her in the head with three or four successive, devastating blows. When Bria looked up again, the little monster smashed another fist into her face, knocking out two teeth.
“This is what bad girls get,” Little Bria explained. “They get punished. When they scare their mothers and touch things they’re not supposed to touch and worry stepfathers into their gravesthey get punished.”
Little Bria hit her again and with such force, she was knocked three feet. Her eye immediately swelled up, squeezing out hot tears.
“Doesn’t feel so good, does it, you little cunt?” the imp said, copious amounts of drool running from its mouth. “Now you know what a piece of meat feels like when its tenderized. And that’s funny, Bria, because that’s exactly what you area piece of meat. A slimy, dirty, dick-sucking, groveling, bulimic piece of meat that did awful things and made terrible promises and now your debt has come due. And what do you think of that, you fucking cunt?”